Humor And Humor Translation-A Case Study Of Fortress Besieged From The Perspectives Of The General Theory Of Verbal Humor And The Relevance Theory

This paper explores the issue of humor and humor translation in the light of Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) and Gutt's translation theory built on relevance theory. GTVH is a linguistic humor theory which proposes a humor mechanism consisting of six Knowledge Resources with Script Opposition or incongruity as its essential Knowledge Resource. GTVH provides an analytic tool and proves useful in pinning down how humor carries through.Based on the Relevance Theory, Gutt's theory points out that the nature of translation is an interpretive use of language and, like any other communicative activities, aims at achieving optimal relevance, the relevance which allows readers to gain maximum contextual effect with minimum effort. Since the notion of "effect", which is connected with readers' cognitive environment and the processing effort, pops up so frequently in the evaluation of humorous texts and their translations, Gutt's theory becomes especially pertinent and, therefore, is incorporated into GTVH to illuminate the issue of humor translation. The paper holds that the translator should compare the cognitive environments of original and target readers and reconstruct various humor clues in a way that can ensure optimal relevance.The data are collected from the famous Chinese novel Fortress Besieged (Wei Cheng) and its English translation. Qian Zhongshu, the author, employs a great many linguistic manipulations to create humor along an essentially serious theme. With the use of the GTVH and Gutt's theory, examples are examined to display how verbal skills are employed to trigger various kinds of incongruities and how efficient the translation is. The analysis indicates that cultural overlaps contributeto cross-cultural humor appreciation and translation while cultural incongruities may lead to a failure.